Sheff At 25: Remarkable Results, Challenges Ahead

A Long Way Forward

Daniel Owen / Hartford Courant

Milo Sheff and his mother, Elizabeth Sheff, are seen on April 27, 1989, at the beginning of the long-running case that bears their name. At right, Caleb Bostic-Gardener, Nazariy Posyko, James Palmer and Keshon Abrom, students at Hartford's Academy of Aerospace and Engineering, the state's...

Milo Sheff and his mother, Elizabeth Sheff, are seen on April 27, 1989, at the beginning of the long-running case that bears their name. At right, Caleb Bostic-Gardener, Nazariy Posyko, James Palmer and Keshon Abrom, students at Hartford's Academy of Aerospace and Engineering, the state's... (Daniel Owen / Hartford Courant)

Just a few blocks from a juvenile detention center, in a Hartford neighborhood once plagued by gang violence, sits the best high school in Connecticut.

The Academy of Aerospace and Engineering has been ranked the top high school in Connecticut and 15th in the nation in U.S. News & World Report's 2013 "Best High Schools" edition.

The magnet school, operated by the Capitol Region Education Council, scored a perfect 100 on the magazine's College Readiness Index, which considers factors such as Advanced Placement participation. The students, about 30 percent each black, white and Latino, engage a rigorous curriculum in a longer school day.

Hartford schools, in such a dismal state in the mid-1990s that the state had to take them over, are undergoing a major renaissance. The driver of this welcome change is, in a word, Sheff, the widely used shorthand for the Sheff v. O'Neill school desegregation lawsuit filed 25 years ago. In the ensuing quarter-century, Sheff has become a movement as well as a national model, and one of the best-known legal cases in the state's history.

More important, it has produced dozens of top schools and given thousands of youngsters an opportunity for a better education. The case "changed education in Hartford fundamentally and for the better," said Richard Wareing, chairman of the Hartford Board of Education. "Without it, none of this would have happened, at least at this scale and as quickly."

The June theme for The Courant's 250th anniversary is race and equality, the subject of the Sheff case. For the next three days, The Courant examines the momentous legal action, to see how far it's come and where it might be going. The focus is on these questions:

•Thanks to a herculean effort and massive investment, 42 percent of Hartford youngsters now attend integrated schools, defined under the Sheff agreements as schools in which less than three-fourths of the students are members of minority groups. What about the other 58 percent of city students?

•When the case was filed in 1989, suburban schools, except Bloomfield's, were overwhelmingly white, and Hartford schools were more than 90 percent minority. There has been a major demographic shift since then. The minority populations have increased, some dramatically, in all of the suburban communities. Today, 50 percent of the public school students in the original 22-town Sheff region are minorities. As sound a goal as it is, how much more integration is possible?

•As middle-class blacks and Latinos have followed middle-class whites to the suburbs, is Sheff now more an issue of poverty rather than race? If that is so, should the focus of the case turn to rebuilding the city, so that integration happens without lawsuits and bus rides?

State Action

That thousands of suburban youngsters would be coming into Hartford to attend school in 2014 seemed hugely unlikely in 1989, when a dedicated group of city and suburban activists filed the action in Superior Court.

The U.S. Supreme Court had limited the options for regional school desegregation under the U.S. Constitution in a 1974 decision involving the Detroit schools. Lawyers for the Sheff plaintiffs — fourth-grader Milo Sheff was the lead plaintiff — brought the case under two clauses of the Connecticut Constitution, one guaranteeing children a substantially equal education and another banning segregation.

They lost at the trial level in 1995 but won the following year in a 4-3 decision by the state Supreme Court, which held that the racial, ethnic and socioeconomic isolation in the Hartford school district was unconstitutional. The court, however, did not order a remedy, instead directing the governor and General Assembly to craft one. There was no stomach for forced busing or the creation of a regional school district, even among the plaintiffs, who feared a backlash.

The legislature passed a law creating voluntary incentives toward integration, the major ones being magnet schools and Open Choice (formerly Project Concern), in which Hartford youngsters are bused to suburban schools (and some suburban kids to Hartford schools). There was an agreement in 2003 that 30 percent of Hartford kids would be in schools with fewer than 75 percent minorities by 2007, a goal that wasn't met. But the state and plaintiffs upped the ante in the 2008 agreement, creating a separate Sheff office and a Regional School Choice office. The new magnet schools — such as the Academy of Aerospace and Engineering— began catching on with suburban families (and creating competition that spurred many towns to improve their own schools).

The 2008 agreement called for 41 percent of Hartford youngsters to be in integrated settings by 2013; the goal was reached, and surpassed, this year.

A new agreement, signed last December, ups the goal to 44 percent by mid-fall. From the original 22 towns, there are now 29 towns that accept Open Choice students and a remarkable 87 towns with students attending Sheff magnet schools.

Turning a failing urban school system around is the most daunting challenge in American education. Reform has stumbled in cities such as Newark despite hundreds of millions in high-profile philanthropy. Hartford, with schools such as Academy of Aerospace and Engineering, has the rest of the country taking notice.

As the legislature examines Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's proposals to upgrade the state's highways, bridges, rail and bus systems, it must not neglect another important form of infrastructure improvement: Internet speed.

It's simple: Just providing voters with election information is key to improving voter turnout, according to a volunteer election watchdog group that has recently released a study of municipal websites.